News & Highlights

The Harvard Forest, Highstead, and authors from around New England have released a new report called “Wildlands and Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities," which broadens a 2010 Harvard Forest vision for conservation to permanently protect forests and farmlands as natural infrastructure that sustains both people and nature in the region.

On Saturday October 7th, from 12 noon until 4 pm, the Harvard Forest will host an opening reception for the Hemlock Hospice art installation on the Prospect Hill Tract and feature prints, drawings and sculptures in science-communication in the Fisher Museum. This exhibition is the work of interdisciplinary artist and designer David Buckley Borden’s year-long collaboration with scientists as a Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow.﻿ The event is free and open to the public.

We know that forests store carbon, but how do we measure the carbon stored in trees without cutting them down? Most researchers use equations that estimate mass (and carbon) based on simple, nondestructive measurements of diameter and species. Improving these equations, and exploring new methods of estimating mass from detailed lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) techniques is important to estimate forest carbon more accurately and efficiently.

Planning for the future involves surmounting uncertainty to anticipate the unknown. An increasingly popular approach for developing future plans while managing uncertainty is scenario development, whereby several consistent and coherent storylines are developed to reflect different hypotheses about how the future might unfold.

Researchers from the Harvard Forest, Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, Michigan State University, Boston University, and CUNY were awarded $1.67 million from the National Science Foundation for a new project, Embedding Public Engagement with Science at Long-Term Ecological Research Sites (PES@LTERs).